Some questions did arise at our last session of Rogue Trader, I've been searching the Forums for suitable threads but there are so darn many so I gave up and fired away anew here, sorry if this is already discussed.

We have a Sword Frigate, 1.6 km long with a crew of 26,000 that sounds very crowded? Do they all fit at this small space? There are also alot of other stuff in the ship that takes up a lot of space. The ship is only 0.3 abeam.

Facts are if you run the math, that these ships arnt crowded at all.

A sword frigate has a mass of 6mega tonnes and a crew of 26000

A aircraft carrier like uss enterprise have a mass of 0.1 megatonnes and a crew of 5800

But sure theres alot more armour on a frigate than aircraft carrier, but compared to the mass, an aircraft carrier is more than 100 times as crowded as your sword frigate.

You also have to remember that these ships are very tall as well. At its tallest point a sword class is nearly a kilometer tall as well from keel to spire.

Aye, fitting all those people in is easy - I think the math showed that, even with the engines and cargo and everything, most of those people ended up with more bunk-space than people on a current-day aircraft carrier would.

The downside of having so much space is that it can be hard to keep track of. Lurking in the hidden spaces between decks and behind machinery could be all kinds of horrible things, and your only indication of it could be the occasional missing crew member!

Fabian Grax said:

yeah, it might seem like a lot, but if you crunch the numbers, it really isn't. remember you're dealing with cubic volume here.

Also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

there you go, 33,000 crew in pressed crew quarters.

Thanks for the input everyone

I did some quick calculations on the the ship from our campaign - at a conservative estimate, the Rose Tattoo has over 3000 kilometres of corridor. And 15 million cubic meters of space they haven't found a use for yet.

One has to wonder how they get around - golf carts? SegWays?

At least my miniatures set-up for next session make sense now - a long abandoned compartment, dozens of decks deep, with a few cranes and transport vehicles slowly rusting centuries after they were forgotten about.

Drhoz said:

There's another recent thread on one of these RT sub-forums discussing this very thing. Plenty of options such as Trams, Futurama/Jetsons Tubes, Rickshaw Servitors, etc. Orks would travel with whatever vehicle fits in the corridor.

I think you've got a combination of very cramped spaces packed with people, very large empty spaces packed with dangerous equipment, and lots of empty, mysterious, spooky places aboard Imperial ships.

Although the volume measurements suggest huge spaces per crewmember, I think these are misleading. If you look at Imperial ships, a lot of the volume is prow ram. I've always seen this as pretty much uninhabited. Then a lot of the aft section is engines. Again, one imagines this is the realm of the Mechanicus, with a relatively low number of actual humans, but large numbers of vast machines that are probably radioactive/hugely dangerous.

And a lot of the central section of the ship is either taken up with cargo (on transports) or with huge macrocannons, each one the size of a WWII frigate.

So yeah, while there's lots of room on an Imperial ship, I really do think that (as a GM anyway) you're justified in presenting different parts of the ship as crowded and squalid, cavernous and empty, or cramped and spooky, according to the needs of your campaign.

Here is an excerpt from page 37 of the book "Star Precinct" by Kevin Randle and Richard Driscoll (It is a description of a starship that is also the one hundred seventh space precinct). This short section of the book really gives the scale of the size of the ship a rogue trader dynasty operates. It also gives a grand description of the multitude of peoples who crew and occupy it.

“ That was the thing about the 107th. It was more than just a police precinct. It was a city drifting in space, following a prescribed orbit through several inhabited solar systems. They sometimes were pulled off their routine to handle special assignments.

But the 107th employed people who were not involved in police work. They were the cooks, the sanitation workers, those who owned the stores, the boutiques, the vid centers, the gaming centers, and the bars. There were those who maintained the ship, who navigated, who piloted, and who controlled it. There were the researchers who staffed the various libraries and research centers, who operated the communications center, and who serviced all the electronics. A large part of the population was lab technicians, forensic experts, medical examiners, and other specialists whose job was the study of evidence gathered by the patrol officers and investigators. There were even those who seemed to have no function in the 107th but who wandered the corridors, and who lived on the very edge of society. And there was the dark side. The holding cells, the prison facility, and the morgue. Only about ten percent of the people of the 107th were Star Cops.

The 107th was a modern city that floated through space to provide a service to the planets that couldn’t afford the technology, or the expertise, that was required of a modern police force. ”

The above description gave me a great idea for running a campaign with a Rogue Trader who has received her Warrant of Trade from the Adeptus Arbites in order to hunt down the recidivists who flee beyond the God-Emporer's boundaries. This idea came to me independently from "Legacy" by Matthew Farrer - though that would be a great back story where Shira Calpurnia receives the Phrax Warrant of Trade from the Inquisition and has to restart the Phrax dynasty as punishment for her failures.

If you allow hoards of mutants who should be put to the holy flames of promethium to crawl around the starship's sub-basement, who is to say you cannot have families of crewmembers, destitute pilgrims taking up the Aquila (see The Blessed Apostles of Saint Asceline on pages 94 to 95 of RT: Edge of the Abyss), illegitimate children, lurking cultists, undocumented stowaways or immigrants (see "Innocence Proves Nothing" by Sandy Mitchell), refugees, machine cultists who think your arecheotech plasma drive is the center of galactic understanding, and the homeless (like the lurker population on the television show "Babylon 5") on board your vessel. The local lurkers could need safe water to drink and tap a water line to get it. This would explain why the Inquisitor Lord Kryptmann barges into your dynasty's staff meeting with a bolter pistol in his hand and his hair full of shampoo suds...

You have to remember your starship's economy has the people who own and operate the businesses and entertainment venues on board, not to mention any criminal syndicates with their "piece of the action." Your Rogue Trader literally is the mayor of a floating city in space with all of its populations and problems. The crew could complain about the long delays in transportation from their quarters to their workstations or that the last crew intake was from a prison and the crime rates have gone up. What happens when you find the Arch-Militant from the Angevin Crusade frozen in the cryogenic storage tubes in sector 7G? Anybody here who has the courage to press the defrost button, step right on up! What about the millionaire playboy who dresses up like a flying rodent to terrorize the corrupt dynasty who operates the starship in revenge for killing his parents who were the rightful heirs to the Warrant of Trade? There are an infinite number of stories that could come from your starship and what lurks in its dark corners.

Stronghold said:

Have a look at this stuff, then, it might help with your campaign: Arbites in Spaaaaaace!

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=123&efcid=3&efidt=357492